November 17, 2008

Sometimes, I have to wonder what our society would look like without sports. Last year's New England Patriots finished the regular season an unprecedented 16-0, and they were heavy favorites in the Superbowl to be the first team to complete a perfect season since the 1972 Miami Dolphins (whose perfect season had a shorter schedule back then). But those New York football Giants made mince-meat out of this tantalizing possibility, and so the Patriots are remembered more for what they could have been than what they achieved. Making the Superbowl a close dramatic contest was good for the sport, but the Patriots did not get rewarded with 40% of the championship or even 20% of the championship. No, they got absolutely zero percent. And I'm no whining Patriots fan. I'm actually a long-time Giants fan with a Rodney Hampton jersey (and as much as I liked Tiki Barber, this team only looks itself with a big smash-mouth bowl-them-over running back like Hampton or Jacobs).

Such is the nature of sports, where large stakes and drastic swings provide potent fuel for dramatic comebacks and big plays that sear themselves into our collective consciousness (I have to believe that even non-Giants fans will remember Eli Manning's pass to David Tyree). Fans and athletes live for this stuff, and all-or-nothing outcomes make perfect sense for an industry whose purpose is to entertain. High stakes make for great drama, and everybody hates to see such dramatic contests end in ties (which is exactly why hockey moved to the shootout, why you can expect football fans to whine about that Eagles-Bengals game, and why no sport allows a championship game to end up in a tie -- kinda like action movies).

I'm clearly a sports fan myself, but I think our society is not very well served when this win-or-lose attitude is forced upon young kids. When kids are left to their own devices, they usually play games without winners and losers. Games where the object is to merely to take turns doing a variety of fun activities, like tag, hide and seek, and duck duck goose. Heck, when I was a kid, we played a game that we called "throw up and kill." No, it didn't involve vomit, it involved throwing a football in the air, and then everybody would try to kill (tackle) whomever caught it. When tackled, they'd throw the ball up, and the game would resume again (and I will insist that "throw up and kill" is a funnier and more descriptive name than "smear the queer," and every bit as memorable).
Note that the object of these games is not to crown a champion, but just for everybody to have fun (we also played football, but throw up and kill was much more fun and we played it more often). This is the important point. Games don't have to be contests. I think it's really the hockey dad and soccer mom types who force the kids into organized sports which most kids probably do not prefer.

With this win-or-lose mindset ingrained as a kid, adults often mistakenly apply this to other areas of life.

August 19, 2008

Last summer, when I was interning in Washington DC, I bought a sketchbook early on, mostly out of fear that I would be a social outcast from both my fellow interns and housemates and thus be relegated to spending entire weekends locked away in my room, attempting to look as if I had something so important to do that I couldn't get away to waste time on such frivolous things like socializing and alcohol.

Such fears proved groundless, and that summer ended up being the most social time I've ever had. But while that meant for an awesomely fun time, the sketchbook stayed empty and untouched until a few weeks ago. I was seeking answers about what I should do with my life now that school was no longer providing direction, and I had found that regressing into childhood activities was therapeutic. So I broke out the crayons, looked for something to draw on, remembered that untouched sketchbook, and then began happily scribbling away.

I have a master's in economics at San Jose State, have taught Principles of Economics there, and now work in educational technology (which dovetails nicely with my former career as a software engineer).